The Soviet Union team pictured during the opening ceremonies for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. This was the last Olympics before the USSR's sudden collapse. YouTube

Although nobody knew it at the time, it was the last hurrah of a communist world only months from collapse

As fireworks burst over the closing ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, there was no doubt who “won” these games.

The Soviet athletes captured a quarter of all medals, easily placing them No. 1 in the standings. Their communist ally of East Germany claimed second place. And in an ignominious third place, with 36 gold medals, was the Reagan-era United States.

Although no one could have known it in that moment, this was the last time the world would ever gaze at a united, powerful and triumphant communist world.

Within mere months, the glittering Soviet sphere that turned out in South Korea would be in ruins, and the flags being waved in triumph would be ripped off flagpoles from Budapest to Warsaw to Prague.

“The Soviet Union, long the bogeyman in a country where the mere mention of communism is anathema, wallowed in the glow of good will,” reported a UPI dispatch from the South Korean games.

The Soviet Union had backed the communist invasion that devastated South Korea during the Korean War. In 1983, they shot down a Korean airliner that strayed into Soviet airspace.

And yet, South Korea ended up being thoroughly charmed by the autocratic superpower. The Kremlin dispatched the Bolshoi Ballet and the Moscow Philharmonic to Seoul to entertain Olympic revellers. In addition, Olympic visitors reported that the Soviet athletes simply seemed to be “nicer.”

The opening ceremonies of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.

The United States, by contrast, stumbled through a series of embarrassing gaffes, including two swimmers who were arrested after stealing a carved lion’s head from a hotel.

While other countries’ athletes made a dignified march around the Olympic Stadium during the opening ceremony, Team USA had spilled out onto the track in an unruly mob. One athlete was even seen frantically waving around a hand-written sign reading “Hi Mom. I’m here.”

The Seoul Olympics were the first time since 1976 that West and East faced each other at the Summer Games.

An alliance of capitalist countries boycotted the 1980 games in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, the Soviets had led a counter-boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

“The gang’s all here,” was how one Canadian correspondent described the turnout to Seoul.

But if western athletes had been expecting to thrash a bunch of out-of-practice communists, they were sorely mistaken. “Many have waited 10 or more years for this opportunity,” Soviet sports official Anatoly Kolesov said at the time.

Soviet Bloc countries not only dominated their usual strongholds like gymnastics and weightlifting, but they even earned surprise wins in categories normally considered safe for the free world.

In a surprise win over Brazil, the Soviet Union captured a gold medal in soccer. The USSR even beat the U.S. at basketball.

“Their voices were subdued, eyes glazed and egos crushed. There were no excuses this time,” wrote the New York Times from the locker room of the U.S. Olympic basketball team.

The games were particularly humiliating for Canada. Sprinter Ben Johnson won gold for Canada with a world record 100-metre run of 9.79 seconds. However, it was ignominiously stripped three days later when Olympic officials found traces of anabolic steroids in Johnson’s urine.

Ben Johnson crosses the finish line first in the 100-metres in Seoul, Korea Sept 24, 1988.

All told, the triumphs of Seoul seemed to be yet another feather in the cap of a Communist world undergoing a kind of renaissance.

Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was well into his program of “glasnost and perestroika,” a policy of reforms intended to repair the calcified leadership and economies of Warsaw Pact countries.

As a result, the year 1988 had been an unending stream of good news stories from the Eastern Bloc.

Loosened trade barriers had introduced the communist world to new products, including the explicitly capitalist board game Monopoly.

Soviet Union CP secretary General Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988.

For the first time, multi-candidate elections were held for the Soviet Union’s Congress of People’s Deputies.

The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and pulled 500,000 troops out of Eastern Europe, effectively ending the Cold War.

While the Olympics were still underway, the Soviet Union even unveiled Buran, a space shuttle that was faster and cheaper than the U.S. version.

There was brewing unrest in Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia, but none of it seemed to portend any imminent collapse of the Soviet empire.

Very few observers could conceive of a 21st century without a significant communist world. There would be modernization and liberalization of the East, perhaps, but there would always be a Red Army, a KGB and a divided Germany.

The unraveling began almost as soon as Seoul had taken down its Olympic banners.

Estonian cyclist Erika Salumäe accepted her track cycling gold medal while representing the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union. When she returned home to Tallinn, however, she was greeted by a sea of blue, black and white Estonian flags.

Within weeks, Estonia had inked the Estonian Sovereignty Declaration, becoming the first country in Europe to effectively divorce itself from the government in Moscow.

Within months, the other Soviet republics — as well as the countries of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe — would all follow suit.

Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader unwilling to use violent force to suppress political dissent, and this fact alone helped unleash an explosive wave of democracy from Siberia to Germany.

Romanian gymnast Daniela Silivaș was one of the brightest stars of Seoul, earning a string of perfect scores that netted her six medals. Like any other Romanian athlete, however, her time in Seoul was under the close watch of the country’s secret police to ensure she didn’t defect.

The regime that paid those guards had only 14 months left to live. By Christmas 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu had been executed by his own armed forces.

This file photo taken of a television screen on December 21, 1989 shows former Romanian communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu delivering his last public speech to Romanian people from the balcony of the Romanian Communist Party Headquarters in Bucharest. Ceaucescu would be executed by firing squad four days later.

Silivaș, in turn, joined an exodus of Eastern Bloc gymnasts who fled to the United States.

Slightly more than a year after their return from Seoul, the seemingly unstoppable East Germany would see the fall of the Berlin Wall. Overnight, some of them would be plunged into the unfamiliar endorsement-filled world of professional competition.

Henry Maske won middleweight boxing gold for East Germany in 1988. He now occupies the extremely un-communist position of owning a string of German McDonalds. Another East German gold medalist, kayaker Birgit Fischer, would pursue a career as a liberal politician.

East and West German soldiers remove some of the first sections of the Berlin Wall at Potsdammer Platz in November, 1989.

As teams marched out of the Olympic stadium at the close of the Seoul Olympics, they passed under a sign reading “See you in Barcelona 1992.”

Of the top 10 medal winners at the 1988 games, half would never again compete at an Olympics. Two, the Soviet Union and East Germany, ceased to exist entirely. The communist nations of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, in turn, rebooted themselves as free republics.

A freer world came to the Barcelona Games in 1992, albeit without the spy novel intrigues of the prior Olympics. The Spanish city did not crawl with foreign secret police on watch for defectors.

The opening of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The medal rankings were still topped by a Unified Team cobbled together from former Soviet republics — and supported thanks to generous sponsorship from Smirnoff vodka.

But with no more Cold War to speak of, Unified Team athletes were no longer communist warriors on a mission from their governments to prove the supremacy of their system. As the last years had shown, Olympic medal tallies weren’t proof of Soviet might — they had been one of the only things that the Soviet system could do well. But even that was exposed as a lie when East Germany’s systematic doping was exposed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And Russian athletes arrive in Pyeongchang without their national flag, punishment for a state-sponsored doping in Sochi in 2014.

Belarussian gymnast Vitaly Shcherbo won an incredible six medals at Barcelona. After the games, he told a reporter he was headed for the west.

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